ng to
lie too near to anyone. He went to his room, and for a long time sat
buried in thought; then, opening the side window, he leaned out. On the
trees of the next garden, and the sloping roofs of stables and outhouses,
the moonlight had come down like a flight of milk-white pigeons; with
outspread wings, vibrating faintly as though yet in motion, they covered
everything. Nothing stirred. A clock was striking two. Past that
flight of milk-white pigeons were black walls as yet unvisited. Then, in
the stillness, Hilary seemed to hear, deep and very faint, the sound as
of some monster breathing, or the far beating of muffed drums. From
every side of the pale sleeping town it seemed to come, under the moon's
cold glamour. It rose, and fell, and rose, with a weird, creepy rhythm,
like a groaning of the hopeless and hungry. A hansom cab rattled down
the High Street; Hilary strained his ears after the failing clatter of
hoofs and bell. They died; there was silence. Creeping nearer,
drumming, throbbing, he heard again the beating of that vast heart. It
grew and grew. His own heart began thumping. Then, emerging from that
sinister dumb groan, he distinguished a crunching sound, and knew that it
was no muttering echo of men's struggles, but only the waggons journeying
to Covent Garden Market.

CHAPTER XIV

A WALK ABROAD

Thyme Dallison, in the midst of her busy life, found leisure to record
her recollections and ideas in the pages of old school notebooks. She
had no definite purpose in so doing, nor did she desire the solace of
luxuriating in her private feelings--this she would have scorned as out
of date and silly. It was done from the fulness of youthful energy, and
from the desire to express oneself that was "in the air." It was
everywhere, that desire: among her fellow-students, among her young men
friends, in her mother's drawing-room, and her aunt's studio. Like
sentiment and marriage to the Victorian miss, so was this duty to express
herself to Thyme; and, going hand-in-hand with it, the duty to have a
good and jolly youth. She never read again the thoughts which she
recorded, she took no care to lock them up, knowing that her liberty,
development, and pleasure were sacred things which no one would dream of
touching--she kept them stuffed down in a drawer among her handkerchiefs
and ties and blouses, together with the indelible fragment of a pencil.

This journal, naive and slipshod, recorded